"THE DAY OF MY DESTINY IS OVER."—Page [304].
When the bills arrived at the bank a strange thing occurred. The fatal omission was made on an acceptance of Blydenstein & Co., a great banking firm in London. The discount clerk noticed the omission of the date of acceptance, but this being a mere formality, he thought it a clerical error on the part of the bookkeeper of Blydenstein & Co. He made no report of the matter, and it was discounted along with the other eighteen, which were put away in the vaults with the batches that had preceded it, while he laid this one aside until the next day, which was Wednesday. At half past ten he gave it to the bank messenger, telling him when he went his regular rounds to take the bill to Blydenstein's and request them to correct the omission.
At 2 p. m. on Tuesday Noyes went to Jay Cooke & Co. and ordered $100,000 in United States bonds, and gave them a check on the Bank of England for the amount. He was to call for the bonds next day, of course, after the check had gone through the Clearing House and had been paid.
As soon as the bank opened on Wednesday, in order to test if everything was all right, Noyes sent in a messenger with a small check, and the money was thrown out as at all other times without remark. And that was a complete demonstration that everything was all right. So it was then, but within thirty minutes from that second the messenger was going to start with the bill to Blydenstein's for correction.
This was 10 o'clock Wednesday. The bills had been twenty-five hours in the possession of the bank, had been discounted and the proceeds placed to my credit for twenty-four hours.
Who with intellect less than an archangel's could have divined the true combination? First of all, that men brilliant and clever, gambling with their lives, could have made such an omission, damning, fatal. Second, if made, that the great Bank of England, thought absolutely infallible by the whole world, conservative, supposedly cautious, would have discounted a bill for £20,00 with the date out of the acceptance, and having done so, hold the bill well on into the second day, without a discovery, and that, too, when the firm whose acceptance was a forgery was not 100 yards away! So when at 10 o'clock on Wednesday Mac saw the small check paid without question to the messenger it seemed he had an assurance doubly sure and a bond of fate that all was well, and that the last batch of bills was packed safely away for another three months in the vaults of the bank.
So Noyes went at once to Jay Cooke & Co., and as the check had been paid at the bank they handed over, as in so many other occasions, the $100,000 in bonds to him.
Mac and George were outside. George took the bonds and gave Noyes a £10,000 check, and one minute from his leaving Jay Cooke & Co., Noyes was at the counter of the bank. The cashier counted out the $50,000 to him. He walked out of the bank with a lighter heart and more buoyant step than ever before, for was not the danger all over and the long strain on the nerves at an end, the transaction complete and fortune won? He was never going to the bank again.
They had arranged to meet at Garraway's Coffee House in Exchange alley. This is the Garraway's that became so famous at the time of the South Sea Bubble, and its fame continued down to the end of the wars of Napoleon. Then its glory departed as a centre of speculations, but its renown as an old-fashioned chophouse remained till 1873. Everywhere in contemporary English literature, from Swift and Addison to Goldsmith and Johnson, one meets references to Garraway's.
The Dean immortalized it in his well-known lines on 'Change Alley: